Since the fractal theory was proposed in 1975, the basic research on the fractal theory has been advanced in the 90s, and is being widely used in the field of natural science in this century, however, not many specific applications have been found under the circumstances. In the fractal theory, when it is configured by a number aD of homothetic figures as obtain by reducing the whole to 1/a, the index D means a dimension, or is called a fractal dimension. This dimension does not need to be an integer, and a complicated distribution may be quantified by a non-integer dimension (See, e.g., a Non-patent document 2).
Various kinds of analyzing methods using the fractal dimension theory have been frequently used in the field of pathological diagnosis. An amorphous discrimination method and an amorphous discrimination apparatus have been proposed that uses the properties that benign tumor cells have strong coupling force between cells, and tends to have a relatively smooth shape in which the obtained cell clusters are closely attached, and that malignant tumor cells have weak coupling force and thus have a large spread of the cell cluster and a more complex shape to discriminate benignity/malignancy of the cell cluster by automatically performing amorphous analysis and not by making a judgment based on subjectivity or experience of humans (See, e.g., a Patent document 1 and a Non-patent document 3).
Further, numerical representation of the grade of malignancy of the lactiferous duct cancer using the fractal dimension has been attempted in a Non-patent document 4. In the research of the Non-patent document 4, the research report on using the fractal analysis to numerically describe the aspect of chromatin in breast cytology has been proposed, where the nucleus images by aspiration biopsy cell diagnosis of the breast for 19 patients whose lesion of epithelial cell is benign and 22 patients with infiltrative lactiferous duct cancer are characterized by fractal Minkowski dimension and the spectral dimension. The aspect of chromatic in the nucleus image of the mammary gland epithelial cell has been proved to be fractal, suggesting that the three-dimensional configuration of the chromatic in the epithelial cell also has a fractal property. A statistically significant difference has been proven to exist in an average spectral dimension between the benign tumor and the malignant tumor, and this leads to discovering a very weak correlation between the two fractal dimensions.
Furthermore, in a Patent document 2, a medical image processing apparatus is disclosed to provide information more effective in identifying the disease by standardizing the image analysis results that tend to be unstable due to dye and setting conditions of the microscope by using the analysis results of non-target cells in the blood smear. The medical image processing apparatus is, in view of achieving the above aim, characterized in that the image analysis that is not influenced by the dye or the setting condition of the microscope is performed by image processing the lymphocyte cell nucleus in addition to the neutrophilic cells to be performed by the image processing, and standardizing the image analysis results of the neutrophilic cell nucleus using the image analysis results as obtained from lymphocyte cell nucleus. Concretely, the medical image processing apparatus is provided for identifying the object using image information, and includes an image cut-out part for cutting out the region where the object is present from the input image, and a luminance information calculating part for extracting the profile of the cut out object and calculating the luminance of the extracted portion and the information analyzed based thereon.
Patent document 1: Japanese patent laid-open publication No. JP-11-120350-A;
Patent document 2: Japanese patent laid-open publication No. JP-2002-140692-A;
Non-patent document 1: William H. Wolberg, et al., “Breast Cytology Diagnosis with Digital Image Analysis”, Breast Cytology Diagnosis, Vol. 15, No. 6, December 1993;
Non-patent document 2: Simon S. Cross, “Fractals In Pathology”, Journal of Pathology, Vol. 182, pp. 1-8, 1997;
Non-patent document 3: Hideki Takayasu et al., “Application of Fractal Image Analysis to Cytologic Diagnosis”, Medical Imaging Technology, Vol. 15. No. 5, pp. 587-591, September, 1997; and
Non-patent document 4: Andrew J. Einstein, et al., “Fractal Characterization of Chromatin Appearance for Diagnosis in Breast Cytology”, Journal of Pathology, Vol. 185, pp. 366-381, 1998.